Kensington and Chelsea approved the destruction of the Earls Court centre last week, nodding through the part of the wider Earls Court project plans that falls into its domain and bringing joy to almost no one except the developer Capco, neighbouring Tories in Hammersmith and Fulham (H&F) and Tory London mayor Boris Johnson, who is less likely to use his mayoral powers to impede the project's progress than Queens Park Rangers are to win the Premier League.

Almost everyone else is fed up, unless you count those overseas investors who see London as a safe spot to park their surplus millions and who, it would appear, are already being wooed for an "off-plan" purchase spree.

Earls Court ward Lib Dem councillor Linda Wade, who also chairs the Nevern Square Conservation Area Residents' Association, has written to me underlining the argument that the loss of the exhibition centres – the Thirties-vintage Earls Court 1 and the much newer Earls Court 2, which will also go - will alter the identity of the area and doom businesses that depend on them for trade. "The density, scale and massing are out of character and context with the existing buildings in height and architecture," she says, a view much in line with the conclusions of the design review panel (see via here) the two boroughs themselves commissioned. They too have cut no ice.

Much of the formal foundation is now in place for Sir Terry Farrell's high rise "villages" to soar from the rubble of the exhibition centres and, across the borough border, of the West Kensington and Gibbs Green housing estates, whose residents oppose demolition by a margin of at least three to one, according to the council's own assessment of responses to its consultation, though you'd never guess that from this finely-spun press release, which also pretends that people living in the surrounding area are firmly in support. The truth is that only a minute percentage of them answered the council's call for their views, whereas the response from the secure council tenants, housing association tenants, leaseholders and freeholders who live on the estates was impressive.

Occupants of those 760 homes - whose tenants and residents associations remain adamant that they will grind the project to a halt - have been promised replacement dwellings within the development area, and the first 200 of these are scheduled for the separate Seagrave Road site, for which H&F granted planning permission in February.

Part of H&F's case for knocking the estates down is that it wants to create a socially virtuous "mixed community," yet the Seagrave Road plans show that those first 200 homes will be clumped all together at one end of the 808 unit site (see "building D" pdf). Perhaps this is in deference to another of the council's promises - that neighbours will be moved with neighbours. But do you sniff a contradiction there?

Meanwhile, I've lately learned that Gibbs Green is home to two Oxford graduates whose neighbours include a cook, a cabbie and an architect. The Earls Court project, by contrast, anticipates supplying only 740 additional, "affordable" - though not very affordable - homes out of a final total of 7,500. Subtract the 760 replacements and that's about 11% "affordable," of which none will be for social rent. Doesn't sound very mixed to me.

About this article

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 01.33 EST on Monday 26 November 2012.
It was last modified at 00.41 EDT on Wednesday 4 June 2014.
It was first published at 01.32 EST on Monday 26 November 2012.